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From: John B. Ellis
Date: 10 Oct 2005
Time: 16:15:45 -0500
Remote Name: 128.138.218.19
Nice job, Gary, distilling emotion-related research and theories and disseminating them to a wider audience. I also appreciate how you provided ideas about how clincians and stutterers could potentially use these findings to guide stuttering assessment and therapy. I have a few comments generally based on the reactions posted earlier by other readers. Agreed, the so-called "low (i.e., subcortical) road" of emotional processing is essentially automatic and involuntary in nature, for it serves, on a basic level, to (a) alert a person to environmental threats and to (b) react quickly to ensure survival. After the fact, the "high (i.e., cortical) road" of emotional processing enables an individual to further assess and appraise the "threat" to determine how to appropriately react in the future. That is, was the "threat" an actual threat? In hindsight, was the person's reaction commensurate with the threat posed? It should be mentioned here that these subcortical structures respond to novel/unexpexted stimuli, not just "threatening" ones, per se. Furthermore, some individuals obviously react more strongly than others to environmental stimuli, so false postives or blatant overreactions to novel/unexpected stimuli are certainly possible. And any number of factors can influence an individual's threshhold of response from situation to situation (e.g., stress, fatigue, drugs, etc). These differences in emotional reactivity may certainly contribute to stuttering, whether or not they represent an indispensible aspect of the disorder. Certainly, there has been converging evidence of tempermental differences between stutterers and nonstutterers (with differences in emotional reactivity among those implicated), but more research is needed to better understand--from a neurological perspective--these emotional factors and how they contribute to stuttering.